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Susan Kruger Winter, M.Ed.

How to Use a Digital (or Paper) Planner

September 22, 2024

When it comes to using a planner, you really should go “back to the future.” We get lots of questions from our clients about how to use a digital planner. To be successful with a digital planner, it’s critical to employ the basics of a paper planner. Paper vs Digital Planners We still stand by…

How to Build an “Anxiety-Free” Environment in Your Classroom

September 15, 2024

Previously, I wrote about How to Help Your Students Manage Anxiety. If you haven’t read that article yet, I suggest you start with it, here. It explains what causes anxiety, which is key to understanding how to manage it. Today, I want to share some strategies for building an “anxiety-free” environment in your classroom. Obviously,…

How to Help Students Manage Anxiety

September 8, 2024

The key to helping students manage anxiety is to understand what’s happening in their brain. “Emotions are the on/off switch to learning,” says Priscilla Vail, author of Smart Kids with School Problems. You and I both know this is true. We know from our own experience that it’s pretty hard to learn geometry theorems when…

The Challenge of Executive Function:
What’s the Antidote?

September 2, 2024

“Students Greatest Need Is Executive Function!” This year, in the SOAR® Learning Laboratories, we challenged ourselves to discover “What do students in special education need the most?” We interviewed special education educators from across the country, expecting to make a “top ten” list we could narrow down to the “top three things” students need. However, we were stunned when one response came…

How to Organize: Papers + Digital Files + Email for Virtual Learning

May 19, 2024

Dozens of Problems… One Solution Ever have a set of horizontal blinds go all wonky… tilting sideways, individual slats facing every different direction?  Yet, with one careful tug on a string, they all conform and neatly snap right back into place… Satisfying feeling, isn’t it? That’s what we do with learning, organization, and soft skills……

The Learning CircuitTM: How Learning Works

August 14, 2022

The Learning Circuit Video Transcription Learning is nothing more than your brain creating new wires. How does this work? Every time you learn something new, your brain powers a connection from something you already understand. When this happens, the neuron wires in your brain –the information you already understand– create new wires to capture the…

“I’m Not Stupid… So, What Is My Problem?!” College Student Shares How He Turned Struggles into Straight A’s with Study Skills

April 10, 2022

Previously, I wrote about my 20 year-old cousin, Kevin. He moved in with us from North Carolina to do an internship with SOAR®. (See the story here.) I made a prediction that within one year, Kevin would be earning straight-As in school. Turns out, I was wrong. It only took three months! Today, Kevin shares…

The Learning Value of Digital Media: Audiobooks, Videos, & Video Games

March 13, 2022

The following article was first published in 2021, during the thick of the pandemic. We wanted to share this article again because the learning value of digital media still remains true to this day! We are both educators, but you can stick a fork in us… we’re DONE! We’ve always said that we could never…

How to Organize Your Digital Workspace

October 7, 2020

When Susan was working on our latest chapter, How to Organize Your Digital Workspace, living with her was like riding a roller coaster… One moment she’s had a breakthrough and really cruising! The next moment, she’s discovered a problem that negates all of her work. She’s back to ground zero.  The next moment she’s got…

The New Landscape of Time-Management in Virtual Learning

September 22, 2020

Exactly one year ago this month, we started an adventure that would become the STEEPEST learning curve of our lives… We launched a hybrid secondary school.  Prophetically, eight months before the world would be flipped upside down, we flipped ourselves upside down! In February, 2020, we finally paused for a moment to catch our breath…

Six Steps
Conquer the Chaos


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